REVISITING THE TEXTUAL PARALLELS AND DATE OF THOMAS OF KENT'S "ALEXANDER" AND JORDAN FANTOSME'S "CHRONICLE"

Abstract

In his 1977 edition of Thomas of Kent's Roman de toute chevalerie (also known as the Anglo-Norman Alexander) Brian Foster briefly commented on a number of verbal parallels or similarities between this text and Jordan Fantosme's Chronicle.' While both poets can be grouped loosely under the designation of 'new historians' who in the course of the twelfth century began to use vernacular verse to compose historically themed material, their subject matter is normally categorized as belonging to two distinct textual genres.2 Thomas's Roman de toute chevalerie is a life of Alexander the Great, King of Macedonia in the fourth century bc (Dean §165), written as a romance and drawing on ancient Latin sources.3 Jordan's poem (Dean §5 5), on the other hand, is a contemporary account of the rebellions of 1173 and 1174 against Henry II, and carried immediate political relevance for its envisaged audience of Anglo-Norman nobles (who probably had fought with or against the king in these recent conflicts).4 Even so, Jordan uses a poetic style owing much to the chanson de geste tradition, and just like the Alexander text his poem is written in monorhymed laisses.5The textual parallels previously noted by Foster were, in brief: firstly, the occurrence of two virtually identical pairs of lines in both texts (Alexander's lines i8i2f. and 1382-4 correspond almost verbatim with the Chronicle's lines 235 b and 318f.); secondly, two proverbs that are used in both works ('voloir de prince tient l'en pur jugement' and 'Icil fet qe sages qui par autre se chastie'); thirdly, the common use of some rare vocabulary (costus in the sense of 'painful, hard', the expression porter (le) cembel, and the demonstrative adjective used before the name of a point of the compass); and fourthly, the incidence of unusual verbal forms (gimes as ind.pr.i of estre and the -ent ending of the ind.pr.3 of verbs in -enter). On the basis of these findings, he concluded that Thomas of Kent must have been influenced by Jordan's poem, written in 1174 or 1175, and derived from that a terminus post quern for the composition of the Anglo-Norman Alexander.6In turn, R. C. Johnston's edition of Jordan's text, published four years later, remarked on the Alexander as one of the few Anglo-Norman texts with a similar prosody, together with Thomas's Romance of Horn, Guischart de Beaulieu's Sermon, and Matthew Paris's La Vie de Seint AubanJ However, his introduction and notes to Jordan's text concentrated mainly on the Chronicle's complex and varied prosody, and did not mention the previously noted similarities and parallels with the Alexander.In this article, I will provide a closer examination of some sections of the Alexander and the Chronicle, and demonstrate that these textual parallels go much further than the examples given by Foster suggest. I will argue that these findings call for a rethinking not only of the relation between the two texts but also of the creative processes behind their composition.If we take Jordan Fantosme's Chronicle as a starting point, the instances of textual overlap with the Alexander emerge almost immediately: as Foster already pointed out, Jordan uses a proverb in his fourth line ('Celui tieng a sage qui par autre se chastie') which also appears in the Alexander ('Icil fet qe sages qui par autre se chastie', line 2382).® Further textual echoes follow, such as between (my italics) 'Li cuens Tiebaut de France demeine grant podne? (Chronicle, line 101) and 'Nicholas demeine orgoil e podnei (Alexander, line 612, variant from the Paris manuscript); between 'El cors me tient la rage, apoi ne sui desvecf (Chronicle, line 129), and 'Tel dolur ad al quer, apoy n'est desvef (Alexander; line 3575); or between 'Od la lune serie anuit eschilguailietf (Chronicle, line 137) and 'La nuit eschaugaitent vint mile compaignon' (Alexander, line 7402). On their own merit, instances such as these cannot be considered anything more than popular sayings or turns-ofphrase common to the genre: they merely confirm that the two poems were written in a similar literary tradition, context, or even just time period. …